“I think (the data) just gives you a sense of context and a sense of where this belongs in history and I think that adds a story to tell. But the analytical community quickly realized that one-number stats aren’t able to portray an entire picture, and analysts moved away from WAR and toward asking smaller questions with smaller answers and different stats that tell you something different. It became apparent that statistical analysis wasn’t just something writers were doing to sell books or fans explored in an effort to win their fantasy leagues.īeyond OPS and WHIP, one of the first big advancements was WAR (wins above replacement), which attempted to take the disparate things a player does on the field and put them into one number. James inspired others to follow with their own ideas, statistics, formulas, articles and books, like John Thorn, Pete Palmer and David Reuther’s ‘The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics.’ The flood of new information continued to evolve in the ’90s and accelerated from there. – now Stats Perform – to publish books about his revolutionary statistics.īill James sought to expand the thought process beyond the numbers on the back of a baseball card.īecause of his work that introduced statistical innovations such as runs created, range factor, win shares, Pythagorean winning percentage, game score, similarity scores and secondary average, he would become known as the Godfather of Sabermetrics – the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Starting in the ’80s, fan and aspiring writer Bill James attempted to expand the thought process beyond the numbers on the back of a baseball card and into what he called the “ever-expanding line of numerical analysis.” James eventually worked with STATS, Inc. Revolutionary executive Branch Rickey, who, of course, signed Jackie Robinson and created the minor league farm system, is also considered a pioneer in the use of statistical analysis for writing an article in Life magazine about an early version of on-base percentage. It’s believed to have started to an extent in the 1950s, when some innovative people began to recognize that the traditional ways of evaluating player performance often did not tell the whole story. The fact is: The practice of looking at statistics differently isn’t a 21st-century development. Others stand by a belief that the influx of data and technology has only made Major League Baseball front offices, coaches, players and fans smarter. However, the insights they surface do serve to make the current generation of baseball fans a lot more informed about the nuances of the game than Abner Doubleday probably could have imagined.Some insist the analytics movement that spread across baseball in the early 2000s, inspiring a best-selling book and a hit movie, didn’t just change the game but ruined it. It’s not likely any of the analytics capabilities provided by FanGraphs and similar sites will one day be able to predict which baseball team will win on any given day. “I like to see where the bottlenecks created by a SQL query are,” he added.įanGraphs plans to eventually take advantage of the data warehouse service provided by MariaDB, Appelman noted. Now he will have more time to create SQL queries and monitor the impact they have on the performance of the overall database, Appelman said. Appleman said he previously handled most of the IT functions for FanGraphs, including the crafting of SQL queries. In addition, MariaDB now manages the underlying database FanGraphs uses. One of the things that attracted FanGraphs to MariaDB is the level of performance that it could attain using a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) platform based on MariaDB and that it provides access to a columnstore storage engine that might one day be employed to drive additional analytics, Appelman said. The decision to move from MySQL to MariaDB running on GCP was made after a few false starts involving attempts to lift and shift the company’s MySQL database instance into the cloud, FanGraphs CEO David Appelman said. These insights might be of particular interest to a baseball fan participating in a fantasy league, someone who wants to place a more informed wager on a game at a venue where gambling is, hopefully, legalized, or those making baseball video games. MariaDB is a fork of the MySQL database that is now managed under the auspices of a MariaDB Foundation that counts Microsoft, Alibaba, Tencent, ServiceNow, and IBM among its sponsors, alongside MariaDB itself.įanGraphs uses the data it collects to enable its editorial teams to deliver articles and podcasts that project, for example, playoff odds for a team based on the results of the SQL queries the company crafts. ![]() MariaDB provides IT organizations with an alternative to the open source MySQL database Oracle gained control over when it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2009.
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